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But it seems to work, as long as you all make the same mistake.

And you were more than brave during the war. Churchill said all he had to offer was blood, toil, tears and sweat. But he left out self-esteem. You taught the world and yourselves that a Brit is a Brit is a Brit.

Meanwhile, Swedes let the Nazis pass through our country, cap in hand. War is bad. And still Europe engaged in war for a long time in the first half of the 20th century. More than 50 million Europeans died. And we came to sensible conclusions: we decided to work together, across the borders, in such a way that attacking your neighbour would be like attacking yourself. We called it the European Coal and Steel Community, a rather ingenious construction presented by a French politician of German descent.

As more countries joined, this community eventually turned into the European Union, and it was quite something. Fifty million died during the first half of the last century.

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Fifty thousand in the second half. Were it not for the downfall of Yugoslavia, there would be no official number at all. But then there is this thing called memory. We tend to forget a lot. Like England not being able to beat Sweden in football for 24 straight years you were just as surprised every time we won. Or like the EU, and what it is really for. In Sweden, people tend to write about how the UK would be worse off leaving the union. The fact that it would be a disaster for the rest of us is given less attention. I think Brexit would be the beginning of the end of an unprecedented period of peace at the heart of Europe.

Without you, the EU will crack at its very seams. I wish you would stay, and that all of us together — in toil, tears and sweat but not blood — will steer the peace project that is the European Union in the right direction. If you accept, you may drive on whichever side of the road you prefer. We will even let you win Euro this summer. After all, the manager of the England team is practically half Swedish. Dear Britain, The country I come from is where Europe technically ends today, or begins, depending on your journey.

But only technically: recently, in European Turkey, I met people who feel proudly European, just minus the passports. To them, Europeanness, like the secular republic, is a hard-won value, worlds away from Brussels, where beautiful Europa has been nibbled to a drab word. The Turks on the west side of the Bosphorus are perhaps the last European idealists. It was the Ottomans who gave Europe — via the Balkans — the word komshulak , neighbourliness, the spirit of living next door convivially, sharing joys and sorrows as the tides of history turn.

Komshulak is the highest, if humblest, form of civility. When it breaks down, everything breaks down. Komshulak is at the heart of the battered European project. Battered but not beaten. Let us not be fooled, on these most westerly isles, that there is some better place, once we drift away.

There is only the cold Atlantic Ocean. I settled in Edinburgh a decade ago, after a decade in New Zealand: I had returned to Europe, and one of its great cities too.

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When I moved to the Highlands, I lost none of this essential Scottish Europeanness, with its unfussy love of eccentricity, diversity, and live-and-let-live attitude, this sense of continuity with the continent even in remote glens. And though I love Scotland with an almost unseemly passion, I feel like an adopted Brit.

Is that a paradox? It is a place where people ride reindeer, grow vines, eat Turkish delight, and call themselves Shetlanders. Europe is now caught in a vicious cycle, oscillating between the false opposites of surrender to global capitalism and surrender to anti-immigrant populism — which politics has a chance of enabling us to step out of this mad dance? The social impact of TTIP is clear enough: it stands for nothing less than a brutal assault on democracy. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of Investor-State Dispute Settlements ISDS , which allow companies to sue governments if their policies cause a loss of profits.

Simply put, this means that unelected transnational corporations can dictate the policies of democratically elected governments. So how would Brexit fare in this context? From a leftwing standpoint, there are some good reasons to support Brexit: a strong nation state exempted from the control of Brussels technocrats can protect the welfare state and counteract austerity politics. However, I am worried about the ideological and political background of this option. The reason for this is obvious: the rise of rightwing nationalist populism in western Europe, which is now the strongest political force advocating the protection of working class interests, and simultaneously the strongest political force able to give rise to proper political passions.

This populism moves beyond the old working class anticapitalism; it tries to bring together a multiplicity of struggles from ecology to feminism, from the right to employment to free education and healthcare. If one disturbs the mechanisms, one is very swiftly punished by market perturbations, economic chaos and the rest.

So how can we push things further after the first enthusiastic stage is over? I remain convinced that our only hope is to act trans-nationally — only in this way do we have a chance to constrain global capitalism. The nation-state is not the right instrument to confront the refugee crisis, global warming, and other truly pressing issues.

And it is because of this margin of hope that I am tempted to say: vote against Brexit, but do it as a devout Christian who supports a sinner while secretly cursing him. Socialist nationalism is not the right way to fight the threat of national socialism. Dear Britain, Imagine for one moment a peculiar kind of parlour game. Look at the gentlemen involved, Alexander I, tsar of Russia, the Duke of Wellington, the devious and eternal Talleyrand, accompanied by a poet and a writer, De Lamartine and Chateaubriand. Remember it is only a game.

Following a career in academia, his profile grew immeasurably during the crisis in Greece that saw the electoral victory of the left-wing Syriza party. For a week or so last year, Catalonia seized headlines in Britain and beyond for its illegal referendum on independence. Violence ensued as Spain imposed direct rule and Puigdemont fled to Belgium. Set in the murky Balkan or Thracian, as she sometimes refers to it borderlands between Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey, she retells the stories of the many people she encounters. She meets with refugees, many of whom have spent or will spend years in the Balkans trying to get through to central and western Europe.

She speaks to the Germans who, during the GDR days, came to Bulgaria for a safer passage to the West as it was easier to cross over there than in heavily-policed Berlin. Owen Hatherley is a British writer and journalist who has made a name for himself writing about architecture, especially its relationship to politics. His focus is both universal and particular as he takes the continent country by country, city by city, analysing the various issues and cracks that have converged to form the fractures alluded to in the title.

Doom-mongering sells, and some of the authors here are more openly pessimistic than others cough, Douglas Murray. On some occasions, we earn revenue if you click the links and buy the products, but we never allow this to bias our coverage. The reviews are compiled through a mix of expert opinion and real-world testing. Black Friday is nearly here.

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Lib Dems. US Politics. Theresa May. Jeremy Corbyn. Robert Fisk. Mark Steel. Janet Street-Porter. John Rentoul. We were advised that the nearest delivery date was another two weeks away — early March. The date arrived and my partner took yet another day off work but it never arrived. He was then told that the order and delivery had been cancelled, without warning.

We were advised to write to head office to explain the situation as no one in the customer services department could help. We have yet to hear from Argos. We have received wrong mattresses of a much lower value , my partner has lost three days of his holiday, while Argos has happily taken our money. This sounds like customer service at its worst — what you ordered was not delivered and you then struggled to get any sense out of the company. This seemed to be product substitution on a major scale.